Lord Goldsmith 'warned Tony Blair Iraq war could be illegal' in 2002

Tony Blair was warned by his Attorney General eight months before the invasion
of Iraq that war would be illegal, it has emerged.

Tony Blair was warned thaht the Iraq war could be illegal' as early as 2002, it has been claimedPhoto: REUTERS

John Bingham and Jon Swaine

3:12PM GMT 29 Nov 2009

In a personal letter to the Prime Minister in July 2002, Lord Goldsmith said that he did not believe military action to depose Saddam Hussein could be justified in international law.

The letter, which has been passed to Chilcot Inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the 2003 invasion, angered Downing Street and led to the Government’s chief law officer being sidelined, it was claimed.

He is said to have threatened to resign and even lost weight as a result of continued pressure on him from Government colleagues in the months which followed.

Two of these advisers – Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, and Baroness Morgan, a Downing Street aide – are said to have confronted Lord Goldsmith over his stance shortly before the invasion.

The allegations led to calls for the Bar Council to reopen an earlier investigation into whether Lord Goldsmith breached professional standards by changing his advice on the legality of war after being put under pressure.

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There were also calls for the Chilcot inquiry to publish the letter in full to maintain public confidence.

The existence of the letter, disclosed in a Sunday newspaper, emerged after a week in which the inquiry heard that Tony Blair and George Bush, the former US President, "signed in blood" a deal to invade Iraq as early as April 2002.

Senior officials who served under Mr Blair also told the inquiry that “drum beats” for war began being heard in Washington as early as 2001.

Tony Blair is due to appear before the inquiry next year when the Goldsmith letter is expected to form a centrepiece of the questioning.

Lord Goldsmith set out his final advice to the Government on March 17 2003, three days before the invasion began, saying that military action could be justified through the combined effect of UN resolutions passed in November 2002 and earlier decisions dating back to the 1991 Gulf War.

But it later emerged that he had advised Tony Blair 10 days earlier that the “safest legal course” would be to seek a fresh UN mandate.

Now it has emerged that he also expressed doubts about the viability of relying on existing UN resolutions eight months earlier.

The letter came six days after the Cabinet is said to have been told of plans for “regime change” in Iraq.

It warned that “regime change” alone could not provide a legal basis for war, neither could humanitarian intervention nor self defence, according to the Mail on Sunday.

A source told the newspaper: “Goldsmith threatened to resign at least once. He lost three stone in that period.

“He is an honourable man and it was a terribly stressful experience.”

Lord Goldsmith denied being pressured into changing his advice although it is understood that the concerns highlighted in the letter were his views in summer 2002.

“He has always maintained that the advice he gave, that military action would be lawful, was his own professional view,” a spokesman said.

“He strongly refutes the suggestion that he might have been forced to take a view that was anything other than his independent opinion.”

Richard Harvey, a barrister who backed an unsuccessful complaint to the Law Society alleging that Lord Goldsmith had changed his advice under pressure, said: “This obviously underlines the reasonable basis of our suspicions and calls for the Bar Council to investigate thoroughly.”

A spokesman for Tony Blair said: “The Attorney General set out the legal basis for action in Iraq in March 2003.

"Beyond that, we are not getting into a running commentary before Mr Blair appears at the Committee.”

Mr Blair later denied that Lord Goldsmith told him before the start of the Iraq War that deposing Saddam Hussein would contravene international law.

Asked on CNN if the allegation that Lord Goldsmith was “gagged” after trying dissuade Blair from lending Britain’s support to the US-led war, the former prime minister responded, “No, it’s not.”

“But I think the best thing with this inquiry is actually to let us all give our evidence to the inquiry,” Mr Blair said.

“I’ve been through these issues many, many times over the past few years and I’m very happy to go through them again. But I think probably the appropriate place to do that is in front of the inquiry.”